Pulphead: Essays (13 page)

I suppose I could baselessly predict that none of this stuff will work out for any of them (though it probably will); I could maybe point out that “reality fame”—as opposed to “acting fame” or another more legitimate type of entertainment notoriety—is a sort of trap. As Monaco put it, “I’ve seen these kids go to premieres with movie stars, and they get, like, a huge response on the carpet, but unless somebody’s paying for the drinks, they can’t afford their own.” Even on
The Real World/Road Rules Challenge
, they get “like, a thousand dollars a week.” And keep in mind that
The Real World
and its spores have been, off and on, MTV’s top-rated shows for about a decade. That’s a screw job. A while back, some of the kids even hired lawyers and tried to band together against the network. But as the Miz put it, “Why would they pay us more? There are so many of us. They’re just like, ‘You won’t do it? Oh, okay. I’ll call so-and-so.’” Plus, there’s that cursed phenomenon again, the way we feel like we know these kids. Who’d want the Miz hosting a top show? That’d be like your brother hosting it. You’d be like, “Oh, there’s my bro, Mike”—flip.

Mainly we spoke of Julie, from the New Orleans cast. She’s the one who said that weird racial thing to Melissa; she’s the one accused of trying to fuck with Melissa’s money; she’s the one who nearly manslaughtered Veronica on the rope-race challenge by trying to disengage Veronica’s safety harness at a height of eighteen stories. (That was another great moment—the whole cast was screaming at Julie; the host even had a megaphone; they were all like, “No, Julie! No!” Veronica was sobbing and screaming. But Julie just gritted her teeth and kept tugging away, bros!) Julie has rediscovered her Mormon faith. Watching her now on the
Challenge
is wild. She’s always praying to herself while she’s scaling the rock wall or whatever. But then, when one of the challenges is on, she jumps up and down and clenches her fists and shrieks like a woman with devils inside her. She’s hands-down one of my all-time fave cast members. Mostly, the talk about Julie went like this.

ME:
Have they ever had a tranny on the show?

CORAL:
Not that we know of. But maybe …

MELISSA:
Maybe Julie?

CORAL:
I saw her balls! I saw them!

MIZ:
But the producers want more … people that people can relate to.

CORAL:
Dude, there’s some trannies that watch
The Real World
!

ME:
Coral, the whole country watches
The Real World
.

CORAL:
[
squinting
] Yeah, but it’s funny, you know—they perpetrate like they don’t.

Coral was lighting cigarettes and then passing them to me. She also let me see the spider tattoo on her foot (to commemorate the spider that bit her there a few seasons back, causing her to have an allergic reaction, which in turn contributed to her and the Miz’s team losing on the
Challenge
). On two separate instances, when the subject came up of whether Coral’s mind-clobbering breasts are real, she grabbed them (somewhat violently), squeezed them together while pushing them up from below, and sort of shook them. Were they real? I don’t know—are the Blue Ridge Mountains real?

Things were maybe winding down when I said, “Coral, what did you mean earlier, when you said that thing about how you don’t watch the show ’cause you know that that ain’t like that?”

The Miz jumped in. (I noticed that, if you ask the Miz a question, Coral answers, and vice versa.)

“Say we’re talking right here,” he said. “There’d be, like, a cameraman right here. There’d be a light guy right here. A director. And there’s, like, five people standing right there, [around] the conversation that you’re in. So it’s like, we know what they’re doing … We also know that, when you’re in interview, they’re asking you questions. A type of question would be, like, ‘Do you think anyone’s talking about you?’”

ME:
“They” are asking you questions?

MIZ:
Yeah.

CORAL:
There’s a confessional … You’re required to do an hour of confessional a week, and there’s also interviews that you have every week. And the person who’s interviewing you is a psychiatrist.

ME:
Are you serious?

MIZ:
Yep, swear to God. Dr. Laura.

CORAL:
Dr. Laura.

MELISSA:
Dr. Laura.

CORAL:
Who I love.

ME:
From the show?

MIZ:
Well, from our show.

ME:
Not the Dr. Laura from …

MELISSA:
Dr. Laura Schlessinger? That would be hilarious …

I’d suspected there were puppeteers involved in
The Real World
, invisibly instigating “drama,” but to think that the network had gone for it like that and hired a shrink? One who, as the kids went on to assure me, was involved not only in manipulating the cast during shooting but also in the casting process itself? And she’s worked on other shows? This explained so much, about
The Real World
, about all of it. When I wrote that business earlier about how the casting people have made the shows crazier and crazier, I didn’t know I was right about any of that! This person is an unacknowledged legislator of the real world. Turns out Dr. Laura is a psychologist, not a psychiatrist, which is better, when you think about it, because psychologists don’t have to take the Hippocratic oath, and she’s definitely, definitely done some harm. No chance I was going to call her.

No, I think I’ll picture the Miz instead, and see him as he was when I was walking out of Avalon, when we said good-bye. He was dancing with that girl whose breast he had signed. They were grinding. The night had gone well. He saw that I was leaving and gave me a wave and a look, like, “You’re takin’ off?” And I shouted, “Yeah, gotta go!” And he shouted, “Cool, bro!” and then he went back to dancing. The colored lights were on his face. People were watching.

In that moment, I found it awfully hard to think anything bad about the Miz. Remember your senior year in college, what that was like? Partying was the only thing you had to worry about, and when you went out, you could feel people thinking you were cool. The whole idea of being a young American seemed fun. Remember that? Me neither. But the Miz remembers. He figured out a way never to leave that place.

Bless him, bros.

MICHAEL

How do you talk about Michael Jackson except that you mention Prince Screws?

Prince Screws was an Alabama cotton-plantation slave who became a tenant farmer after the Civil War, likely on his former master’s land. His son, Prince Screws, Jr., bought a small farm. And that man’s son, Prince Screws III, left home for Indiana, where he found work as a Pullman porter, part of the exodus of Southern blacks to the Northern industrial cities.

There came a disruption in the line. This last Prince Screws, the one who went north, would have no sons. He had two daughters, Kattie and Hattie. Kattie gave birth to ten children, the eighth a boy, Michael—who would name his sons Prince, to honor his mother, whom he adored, and to signal a restoration. So the ridiculous moniker given by a white man to his black slave, the way you might name a dog, was bestowed by a black king upon his pale-skinned sons and heirs.

We took the name for an affectation and mocked it.

Not to imply that it was above mockery, but of all the things that make Michael unknowable, thinking we knew him is maybe the most deceptive. Let’s suspend it.

Begin not with the miniseries childhood of Joseph’s endless family practice sessions but with the later and, it seems, just as formative Motown childhood, from, say, eleven to fourteen—years spent, when not on the road, most often alone, behind security walls, with private tutors and secret sketchbooks. A cloud-headed child, he likes rainbows and reading. He starts collecting exotic animals.

His eldest brothers had at one time been children who dreamed of child stardom. Michael never knows this sensation. By the time he achieves something like self-awareness, he is a child star. The child star dreams of being an artist.

Alone, he puts on classical records, because he finds they soothe his mind. He also likes the old Southern stuff his uncle Luther sings. His uncle looks back at him and thinks he seems sad for his age. This is in California, so poor, brown Gary, with its poisonous air you could smell from leagues away—a decade’s exposure to which may already have damaged his immune system in fateful ways—is the past.

He thinks about things and sometimes talks them over with his friends Marvin Gaye and Diana Ross when they are hanging out. He listens to albums and compares. The albums he and his brothers make have a few nice tunes, to sell records, then a lot of consciously second-rate numbers, to satisfy the format. Whereas Tchaikovsky and people like that, they didn’t handle slack material. But you have to write your own songs. Michael has always made melodies in his head, little riffs and beats, but that isn’t the same. The way Motown deals with the Jackson 5, finished songs are delivered to the group from songwriting teams in various cities. The brothers are brought in to sing and add accents.

Michael wants access to the “anatomy” of the music. That’s the word he uses repeatedly.
Anatomy
. What’s inside its structure that makes it move?

When he’s seventeen, he asks Stevie Wonder to let him spy while
Songs in the Key of Life
gets made. There’s Michael, self-consciously shy and deferential, flattening himself mothlike against the Motown studio wall. Somehow Stevie’s blindness becomes moving in this context. No doubt he is for long stretches unaware of Michael’s presence. Never asks him to play a shaker or anything. Never mentions Michael. But Michael hears him. Most of the Jackson siblings are leaving Motown at this moment, for another label, where they’ve leveraged a bit more creative sway. The first thing Michael does is write “Blues Away,” an unfairly forgotten song, fated to become one of the least-dated-sounding tracks the Jacksons do together. A nice rolling piano riff with strings and a breathy chorus—Burt Bacharach doing Stevie doing early disco, and some other factor that was Michael’s own, that dwelled in his introverted-sounding vocal rhythms. Sweet, slightly cryptic lyrics that contain an early notion of melancholy as final, inviolable retreat: “I’d like to be yours tomorrow, so I’m giving you some time to get over today / But you can’t take my blues away.”

By 1978, the year of “Shake Your Body (Down to the Ground)”—cowritten by Michael and little Randy—Michael’s methods have gelled. He starts with tape recorders. He sings and beatboxes the little things he hears, the parts. Where do they come from? Above. He claims to drop to his knees and thank Jehovah after he snatches one. His voice coach tells the story of Michael one day raising his hands in the air during practice and starting to mutter. The coach, Seth Riggs, decides to leave him alone. When he comes back half an hour later, it’s to Michael whispering, “Thank you for my talent.”

Some of the things Michael hears in his head he exports to another instrument, to the piano (which he plays not well but passably) or to the bass. The melody and a few percussive elements remain with his vocal. The rest he assembles around it. He has his brothers and sisters with him. He conducts.

His art will come to depend on his ability to stay in touch with that childlike inner instrument, keeping near enough to himself to heed his own melodic promptings. If you’ve listened to toddlers making up songs, the things they invent are often bafflingly catchy and ingenious. They compose to biorhythms somehow. The vocal from Michael’s earlier,
Off the Wall
–era demo of the eventual
Thriller
hit “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’” sounds like nothing so much as playful schoolyard taunting. He will always be at his worst when making what he thinks of as “big” music, which he invariably associates with military imagery.

Nineteen seventy-nine, the year of
Off the Wall
and his first nose job, marks an obscure crisis. Around the start of that year, they offer him the gay lead in the film version of
A Chorus Line
, but he declines the role, explaining, “I’m excited about it, but if I do it, people will link me with the part. Because of my voice, some people already think I’m that way—homo—though I’m actually not at all.”

People want to know, Why, when you became a man, did your voice not change? Rather, it did change, but what did it change into? Listening to clips of his interviews through the seventies, you can hear how he goes about changing it himself. First it deepens slightly, around 1972–73 or so. (Listen to him on
The Dating Game
in 1972 and you’ll hear that his voice was lower at fourteen than it will be at thirty.) This potentially catastrophic event has perhaps been vaguely dreaded by the family and label for years. Michael Jackson without his falsetto is not the commodity on which their collective dream depends. But Michael has never known a reality that wasn’t susceptible on some level to his creative powers. He works to develop something, not a falsetto, which is a way of singing above your range, but instead a higher range. He isolates totally different configurations of his vocal cords, finding their crevices, cultivating the flexibility there. Vocal teachers will tell you this can be done, though it’s considered an extreme practice. Whether the process is conscious in Michael’s case is unknowable. He probably evolves it in order to keep singing Jackson 5 songs every night through puberty. The startling effect is of his having imaginatively not so much castrated himself as womanized himself. He essentially evolves a drag voice. On the early demo for “Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough,” recorded at home with Randy and Janet helping, you can actually hear him work his way into this voice. It is a character, really. “We’re gonna be startin’ now, baby,” he says in a relaxed, moderately high-pitched man’s voice. Then he intones the title, “Don’t stop ’til you get enough,” in a softer, quieter version of basically the same voice. He repeats the line in a still higher register, almost purring. Finally—in a full-on girlish peal—he sings.